amelioration. All nature ministers to Shakspeare, as gladly as a mother to her child, while he "glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." Whether he wishes to depict Romeo's love, or Hamlet's philosophy, or Miranda's innocence, or Perdita's simplicity, or Rosalind's playfulness, or the sports of the Fairies, or Timon's misanthropy, or Macbeth's desolating ambition, or Lear's heart-rending frenzy--he has only to ask, and she vouchsafes every feeling and every passion with which he desires to actuate and invest his inimitable creations. For six centuries, millions of readers, in and out of the church, had fed on religious romance, which had continually depreciated in merit, when John Bunyan was born, 1628, to gather up every remnant of excellence which had ever been expressed under that type; and having re-issued the essence of it all most divinely refined, he terminated legendary literature forever. With the same providential intent, in the same year that Michael Angelo died, William Shakspeare was born, and having perfected to the last degree every element which had accumulated during the lapsing of thirty centuries, romantic literature ended with the closing of his grave. Mid-way between Shakspeare and Bunyan, Milton lost his eyes; and Poetry, Freedom, and Religion, at the same time lost theirs for a season. But, behold! The splendors which fade along the western sky of the old world already foretoken the rising of a brighter day over the new. CHAPTER II. ART. In reviewing the various realms of art in the age of Leo X., we shall first consider the origin and progress of the architecture peculiar to that great stage of human development, and then proceed to notice briefly the sculpture, painting, and other correlative productions. The sources of illustration are so numerous, and the material so abundant, it will be necessary to observe comprehensiveness as far as possible in the exploration of each department. The facts of history require us to resume the consideration of debased Roman art at its nadir of utter degradation in the fifth century, and thence to follow it as it arises with a new life, transformed into two original types, Gothic and Byzantine, till both blended in the Christian architecture of the thirteenth century, and this in turn perished before the rising influence of the Renaissance. The old Romanesque prevailed from the time of Constantine to that of Justinian, and always remained the molding influence in Teutonic art. The Byzantine style absorbed into itself oriental lightness and beauty, traversed the whole domain of superannuated civilization in the East, and, with all its modifying charms, in due time coalesced with the more rugged and progressive element in the far West.